This year, for the first time, the World Bank dedicated its 2012 annual flagship World Development Report to women as indispensable players in the global economy and launched a media campaign to "think equal".
The State Council on Tuesday adjourned till Dec. 27 a case against the military institution to end the practice of virginity tests.
While female voters are turning out in huge numbers for the elections, some feminists are boycotting them. Women have been turning out in force in the early days of Egypt's parliamentary elections this week, some queuing for as long as seven or eight hours to cast their vote. But there are mounting concerns that the first election since the fall of President Hosni Mubarak will not provide the longed-for improvement in women's lives.
After repeated delays, Libya announced the lineup for a transitional government that will draft a constitution and prepare the country for elections.
Source: IRIN
AIDS activists have welcomed a pledge by US President Barack Obama to provide antiretroviral treatment to some six million people globally by 2013, an increase of two million on the previous target.
United in song and in views, participants of today’s Rural Women’s Forum gathered at the Occupy Land site just outside the Inkosi Luthuli International Convention Centre to raise their views.
An International expert on Women’s and Health Specialist has spoken out on the topic in the number of deaths occurring worldwide from maternal mortality. “It is a human rights violation because most countries in the world had signed to the United Nations declaration on the right to life,” says Ottowa, Canada based Dr. Andre Lalonde, former executive vice-president of the Society of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists of Canada.
Whose culture, and to what end? These questions cropped up again last week when Mandla Zwelivelile Mandela, an ANC MP better known as the grandson of Nelson, met with the Tshwaranang Legal Advocacy Centre, the Rural Women's Movement and the Commission on Gender Equality to clarify his position on ukuthwala.
ARV treatment is a crucial health intervention and every effort must be made to increase coverage. However, other reproductive health services continue to be neglected, with dire consequences for women.
Source: Open Democracy
It is time that debates surrounding religion and migration in the UK move beyond the almost monolithic focus on Islam, recognising the multiple and fluid ways in which religion shapes, and is in turned shaped by, experiences of migration, says Chloé Lewis and an overall threat to ‘British identity’.
Source: The Independent
Their `century’ shouldn’t be perceived as the end of men. On Sept. 21 Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff became the first woman ever to give the opening speech at UN General Assembly session. She called this ‘the century of women’.
Source: allAfrica.com
When a baby is born, everyone is in awe of how cute, tiny and innocent the baby is. But what turns these little sweet angels into monsters who will beat their wives (or husbands) and children within an inch of their life? What are the influences that will eventually make a man feel no remorse as he plucks off patches of hair from his wife's head in anger or burn their little child out of spite?
Source: This Day Live
Nigerian Airspace Management Agency (NAMA), has instituted an annual scholarship of N250, 000 to support each beneficiary for the training of female engineers in any of the tertiary institutions in the country.
Source: The Citizen
As Tanzania joined the rest of the world to mark this year's World Aids Day on Thursday, some two million women across the country had every reason to celebrate the day.
Source: Daily Monitor
Head of states from the Great Lakes Region are primed to deliberate mechanisms to end gender-based sexual violence, including Femal Genital Mutilation when they meet in Kampala on December 15.
Source: Nairobi Star
The provincial administration in Kuria East and West districts has been told to step up the war against Female Genital Mutilation. The Education Center for the Advancement of Women has written to DCs James Mugwe (Kuria West), Njuki Mutindika (Kuria East) demanding that perpetrators of the vice be brought to book.
Source: Angola Press
The chairperson of the National Electoral Council (CNE), Suzana Inglês, Friday in Luanda expressed concern about a poor adherence of women to the ongoing countrywide voter registration and update process closing its first phase on December 16.
Source: RNW
The Lady Mechanic Initiative in Nigeria trains women, some of whom have been, or are vulnerable of becoming prostitutes, to fix cars. There are even women at work in Kaduna, a state infamous for Sharia law and inter-religious violence.
Source: Myjoyonline
The International Planned Parenthood Federation, the global movement that promotes reproductive health says by 2030 HIV AIDS infections would have drastically reduced to the levels of polio infections today which has almost been eradicated.
On the 20th anniversary of the global Sixteen Days of Activism on gender violence campaign, Shuvai Nyoni Kagoro asks whether ‘the millions of dollars spent in cash and human time’ have significantly reduced the violence women and other marginalised groups face ‘because of their gender’.